Last night, Jesse and I sat down to look over the menus for the Hotel Phillips, and after doing the math, we figured out that having the reception there would cost us a minimum of $20,000 - $25,000. That's just for room rental, food, and drinks.
Yeah, I'm thinking that might not work out. Unless I decide to wear jeans instead of a dress, pick some widlflowers for my bouquet, and have people take pictures with their digital cameras and send them to me later via e-mail. Oh, and we can all hum songs as we dance instead of having a DJ. And we'll be eating my famous brownies (from a box mix!) instead of an actual wedding cake, but I'm sure I can figure out how to make that work between now and the actual wedding date.
No. Maybe not. I'm kinda looking forward to wearing a really pretty dress...
HOWEVER, I do intend on reserving a block of rooms there for the wedding, depending on where we wind up for the ceremony and venue of course. In October this year, their basic room prices are at $129, which is totally reasonable when compared to other hotels in the area, and it's such a lovely little place.
I'm going to keep tweaking it to see how I can/if I can get it to work out, but it really might not come together. It'd take a LOT of extra planning to get it there (and a LOT of cutting of the guest list, too), so I really don't think it'd be worth it in the end. We'll see...
Thursday, August 31, 2006
Wednesday, August 30, 2006
Blow number 1 to my wedding planning ego...
The Hotel Phillips in downtown KC. I haven't looked at it yet, but I still think that it would be my number 1 choice for venue (their menus look AMAZING!), and it's not big enough to handle the sit-down dinner Jesse and I want to have.
Shoot, shoot, shoot...
Actually, it can accomodate the number we'll probably end up with, but it'd be all funky, with the dance floor in one room, the game room in another spot, and the dinner on a totally different level of the hotel. Which would mean a need for 2 DJs. I don't know...maybe it'd work. I don't know, I don't know...It could be neat, I suppose. I'm just gonna have to go look at it, I think, so I can have a better picture in my head of how it'd all break down.
I start visiting venues tomorrow! Jesse would rather skip the visit to the golf club on Saturday morning so he can try to work earlier so he can finish up earlier and sit down to watch the Notre Dame game with me after he's done in the kitchen. That's fine with me. (Even though we have TiVo and can record the game and watch it on Sunday night, which I probably would want to do anyway as the USC game is on at the exact same time as the Notre Dame game on Saturday night and it's gonna be hard to focus on both games at the same time, but whatever. Boys are silly sometimes...)
I'm feeling better today than I did yesterday. I got a lot of sleep last night (a whole 7 hours!), had a fun morning dropping the puppy off for her snip-snip appointment - and no, I don't mean a haircut, and a coworker is buying lunch today because I hauled a bunch of cases of beer (with the help of my co-admin here at the office) to a 4th floor open house they were throwing at one of their properties last night. So yeah...so far, so good. Hopefully I'll have time to contact all the churches on my list sometime this afternoon! I'll keep y'all posted on what I find out...
Shoot, shoot, shoot...
Actually, it can accomodate the number we'll probably end up with, but it'd be all funky, with the dance floor in one room, the game room in another spot, and the dinner on a totally different level of the hotel. Which would mean a need for 2 DJs. I don't know...maybe it'd work. I don't know, I don't know...It could be neat, I suppose. I'm just gonna have to go look at it, I think, so I can have a better picture in my head of how it'd all break down.
I start visiting venues tomorrow! Jesse would rather skip the visit to the golf club on Saturday morning so he can try to work earlier so he can finish up earlier and sit down to watch the Notre Dame game with me after he's done in the kitchen. That's fine with me. (Even though we have TiVo and can record the game and watch it on Sunday night, which I probably would want to do anyway as the USC game is on at the exact same time as the Notre Dame game on Saturday night and it's gonna be hard to focus on both games at the same time, but whatever. Boys are silly sometimes...)
I'm feeling better today than I did yesterday. I got a lot of sleep last night (a whole 7 hours!), had a fun morning dropping the puppy off for her snip-snip appointment - and no, I don't mean a haircut, and a coworker is buying lunch today because I hauled a bunch of cases of beer (with the help of my co-admin here at the office) to a 4th floor open house they were throwing at one of their properties last night. So yeah...so far, so good. Hopefully I'll have time to contact all the churches on my list sometime this afternoon! I'll keep y'all posted on what I find out...
Tuesday, August 29, 2006
Week 2 - Only 52 more weeks to go!
Today's challenge is to find the time to contact a church regarding performance of the ceremony. Right now, I do not attend any particular church on a weekly basis, as I have been "saving myself" (in a way) for the proper community. I love our neighborhood...I really do. My neighbors are awesome, we look out for each other, we're in a fabulous location in the city, and our street just got re-paved. Gotta love it. However, when I moved in 3 years ago (pre-Jesse, of course), I had only planned on staying in the house for a maximum of 5 years, and got a home loan accordingly. The biggest question looming over my little life prior to the proposal was should I sell the house first, or should we get married first? I knew that I wanted to marry Jesse, and I knew that I wanted to sell the house. Preferably, I would be able to do both in 2007 sometime.
And I can almost hear the shaking of the heads out there as people think exactly what I thought immediately after asking myself that question every few days or so. I would say, "Self? Can I sell the house in the summer if Jesse and I plan on getting married in October?" And Self would answer back with a resounding, "HELL no!" It would be insane. There is no way that I would escape institutionalization after attempting to do both things in the same year, so plans sort of made themselves after I resolved that battle within myself.
Annnnyway....so we'll be living in the house for a bit longer than I anticipated when I originally bought it. But I also love the neighborhood a bit more than I anticipated, and I also hate the house a little more than I anticipated. It's a big mess, really, so let me scoot along to my original point.
I never started going to the Catholic church down the street because I didn't want to start in as a member of the community without knowing that I was going to be there for a long while...like, at least 10 years kind of long while. Some of you may not know this about me, but I've moved around a bit. Ok, actually, I've moved around A LOT since I originally started college and moved out of my parents' home back in 1992. I've lived in Malibu, West L.A., Kansas City, Overland Park, San Diego, Chicago (when I was traveling for work), Northern California, Boston, and back in Overland Park again. Since I've been back in this area, I've only moved 3 times, but each time has taken me to a new church community boundary, meaning that I would have had to change churches 3 times since 2000, and that just gets soooo old after a bit. If I could have picked up my church in Boston and brought it with me for my last 3 moves, I would have. I loved it there.
Hey. Can I have the ceremony in Boston, and then have the reception in Kansas City? Wouldn't that be fun?! No? Whatever...party poopers.
So that's that. I've moved a lot, and I was tired of switching from church to church, and basically stopped attending regular mass back in 2000. I'm still big into my faith and love being a Catholic, and completing my next sacrament (i.e. marriage...since Jesse saved me from becoming a nun at some distant point down the road) is important to me. Unfortunately, the church that we live "within the boundaries of" isn't my style. (Family members, it reminds me of St. Bruno's. Yeah...it's that cool...) Jesse doesn't like the looks of it from the outside (I tend to agree for the most part), and I've never been inside it, so I don't know what to expect. They have an enormous mural of something...not sure if it's Mary or Jesus, to be quite honest...above the main entrance, and it just looks gaudy to me. I'm sure it's a lovely little community of people, but I can't bring myself to be that interested in wanting to get married there is the thing. It's last on my list.
I'm feeling a little bit uncomfortable contacting churches that I don't belong to, asking them if they will let me marry my currently-agnostic fiance at their altar, and trying to figure out all the fun details that go along with that question.
What it's looking like is going to happen is I'm going to have to accept the fact that I will likely have to have a ceremony someplace other than in a Catholic church, and that adds another fun dimension on to the scouting of the reception venue! AND does that mean we can have a pretty huppah over us and Jesse gets to step on and break a glass at the end of the ceremony? That always looks like so much fun. It's like, "Yeah! We're done! Now let's break things and get this party started, yo!!" (Although I'm sure it has a different meaning from that interpretation all together...it's kinda what I hear in my head when I see it on t.v.)
So. That's what's happening today. I have two appointments this week to look at locations, one of which Jesse will be able to attend with me I hope, and then I'm working on a third for hopefully another day this week or early next. One is a specific location just for events like meetings and weddings, another is a golf club that I've always admired and thought of as a possible location for my eventual wedding, and the third is this really cool looking, very elegant and yet relaxed "boutique" hotel downtown. Which happens to be across the street from the first location.
This is fun an exciting, I swear. But these first couple of weeks of the whole thing have been a little overwhelming, to say the least. Stay tuned for more fun updates...
And I can almost hear the shaking of the heads out there as people think exactly what I thought immediately after asking myself that question every few days or so. I would say, "Self? Can I sell the house in the summer if Jesse and I plan on getting married in October?" And Self would answer back with a resounding, "HELL no!" It would be insane. There is no way that I would escape institutionalization after attempting to do both things in the same year, so plans sort of made themselves after I resolved that battle within myself.
Annnnyway....so we'll be living in the house for a bit longer than I anticipated when I originally bought it. But I also love the neighborhood a bit more than I anticipated, and I also hate the house a little more than I anticipated. It's a big mess, really, so let me scoot along to my original point.
I never started going to the Catholic church down the street because I didn't want to start in as a member of the community without knowing that I was going to be there for a long while...like, at least 10 years kind of long while. Some of you may not know this about me, but I've moved around a bit. Ok, actually, I've moved around A LOT since I originally started college and moved out of my parents' home back in 1992. I've lived in Malibu, West L.A., Kansas City, Overland Park, San Diego, Chicago (when I was traveling for work), Northern California, Boston, and back in Overland Park again. Since I've been back in this area, I've only moved 3 times, but each time has taken me to a new church community boundary, meaning that I would have had to change churches 3 times since 2000, and that just gets soooo old after a bit. If I could have picked up my church in Boston and brought it with me for my last 3 moves, I would have. I loved it there.
Hey. Can I have the ceremony in Boston, and then have the reception in Kansas City? Wouldn't that be fun?! No? Whatever...party poopers.
So that's that. I've moved a lot, and I was tired of switching from church to church, and basically stopped attending regular mass back in 2000. I'm still big into my faith and love being a Catholic, and completing my next sacrament (i.e. marriage...since Jesse saved me from becoming a nun at some distant point down the road) is important to me. Unfortunately, the church that we live "within the boundaries of" isn't my style. (Family members, it reminds me of St. Bruno's. Yeah...it's that cool...) Jesse doesn't like the looks of it from the outside (I tend to agree for the most part), and I've never been inside it, so I don't know what to expect. They have an enormous mural of something...not sure if it's Mary or Jesus, to be quite honest...above the main entrance, and it just looks gaudy to me. I'm sure it's a lovely little community of people, but I can't bring myself to be that interested in wanting to get married there is the thing. It's last on my list.
I'm feeling a little bit uncomfortable contacting churches that I don't belong to, asking them if they will let me marry my currently-agnostic fiance at their altar, and trying to figure out all the fun details that go along with that question.
What it's looking like is going to happen is I'm going to have to accept the fact that I will likely have to have a ceremony someplace other than in a Catholic church, and that adds another fun dimension on to the scouting of the reception venue! AND does that mean we can have a pretty huppah over us and Jesse gets to step on and break a glass at the end of the ceremony? That always looks like so much fun. It's like, "Yeah! We're done! Now let's break things and get this party started, yo!!" (Although I'm sure it has a different meaning from that interpretation all together...it's kinda what I hear in my head when I see it on t.v.)
So. That's what's happening today. I have two appointments this week to look at locations, one of which Jesse will be able to attend with me I hope, and then I'm working on a third for hopefully another day this week or early next. One is a specific location just for events like meetings and weddings, another is a golf club that I've always admired and thought of as a possible location for my eventual wedding, and the third is this really cool looking, very elegant and yet relaxed "boutique" hotel downtown. Which happens to be across the street from the first location.
This is fun an exciting, I swear. But these first couple of weeks of the whole thing have been a little overwhelming, to say the least. Stay tuned for more fun updates...
Monday, August 28, 2006
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